How I deal with social media misuse

I always thought that I wasn’t that addicted to social media like most of the people I’ve seen out there. But that didn’t mean that social media didn’t lead me to put myself in a foolishness. I might not be that kind of person who took hundreds of selfies or made stories every hour, but there were many times I wasted on the social media that brought no good for me.

I figured out that I’ve been doing things I never needed to. I spent a lot of time scrolling through social media’s feed and timeline thinking I would find any good news and get inspired by the posts from some public figure I followed. What I got instead was beyond the expectation. I ended up wandering through many people’s feed. It was not a big problem until I realized I spent few hours to watch people judging the others and people judging the other people for judging the other. This happens a lot in celebrities’ and gossips’ account. Although I don’t and won’t follow those accounts, I can still find some in the explore tab.

These are few things I keep in mind to never let myself misuse the social media.

1. Stop the urge of stalking

There were times when I went through someone’s Instagram cause I couldn’t stop myself from seeking any information that could tell me much or less of his life and personality. Going through this person’s Instagram was such a right move to find out lots of thing about him. I barely knew this guy but looking at his Instagram posts, I could tell those moments when he was feeling in love, happy, mad, motivated, hopeless, bored and else. Knowing these things might be helpful for me who wanted to know more about this guy but had no chance to do it.

I then realized that stalking a person’s social media only consumed me. There were few moments when I couldn’t sleep cause those things about him filled my head and got me wondering even more. I forced my self to stop following my curiosity and I never felt any better since I stopped doing something I shouldn’t do.

2. Enjoy the moment without the need to post it

Going on vacations, having lunch with family, or attending cool events might be few things that I would like to post on Instagram. I always had those feeling - not much, though - to capture some details of my life that I thought it would look good on my feed. Although posting some moments never distracted me with my quality time, I found it much better to not post it.

If I wanted to post this, I might want to post that. If small things had triggered me to post them, what will happen if I had big things?

3. Be wise of what to read

Viral articles and offensive comments had been pulling my attention. It was never good to see those people trying to strengthen their arguments in the comment section. Reading negative comments could only provoke me and it wasn’t healthy to care about them. As I felt that reading comments was a bad idea, I tried to read the articles only and neglect the comment section. It worked better to make me feel less stressed but never worked better than moving on to the other articles platform. Ever since I uninstalled that news platform with the comment section, I looked for the articles and news apps that provide any articles that I wanted to read.

4. No more exploring

Finding a post could lead to an unstoppable exploring that ended up to waste of time. The curiosity might have taken my attention way too many times if I hadn’t realized that I didn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t care about anyone else’s business. Stopping the curiosity may be the hardest, so I decided to uninstall some social media apps.

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I have deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts as I wasn’t very active on them like I was when I still studied in high school and college.

Life isn’t really different, however, since I quit social media. But I can’t imagine if I kept on doing those useless things I did on social media. That’s not how I want my life would be. There’s so much more in this world that can give me good things without the need to re-frame it.